Aside from being among the most beautiful songs in Sheryl Crow’s very large catalogue of extraordinary, Chances Are lyrically reaches deep down inside and churns about, exploring within. The lyrics seem to be about trying to make a difficult relationship work, but I enjoy reading it as a light on the pathway of spiritual living, especially the refrain.Read more »

This poem began with just the first line and the idea that being a spiritual being comes down to ‘bridging the gaps’ between body, mind and soul. As three became one, One grew into a paean to the ongoing global spiritual awakening.Read more »

I was digging into Stephen Mitchell‘s The Second Book of the Dao one day back in January (over a lovely Red Snapper Soup @ Granville Island) when a passage in the second chapter inspired the following poem.

Before and After

Before sorrow, longing
Before longing, anger
Before anger, pain
Before pain, injury
Before injury, fear

In all these there is no suffering
Suffering comes only when there is no after

Before after, forgiving
Before forgiving, love
Before love, courage
Before courage, self
Before self, surrender

This one isn’t about pain. Not at all. It’s about perfection. This one is about the fire that burns inside each of us. Well, maybe there’s a little pain. It’s the pain you feel in your eyes as the sun rises beyond the horizon, growing brighter and brighter. But it’s a good pain, a pain I need to learn to feel. Not endure. Feel. It’s a pain like the ice cube’s first touch on overheated flesh, which is a funny pain to be talking about when the object of your metaphor is a match.

What got me going on matches and internal flames was this quote a friend posted a few days ago on Facebook.Read more »

Heart’sDog & Butterfly has been on my mind and in my ears a lot the last few days, both the album and the title song from it. I love the song for the mirthful image of a dog futilely leaping after a fluttering butterfly, and for its wisdom in directing us in our moments of hardship toward an appreciation of something as simple and beautiful as a fragile, graceful butterfly confounding an ever-so-agile and intent pooch. Still, I sensed there was something more, as there often is with songs that stay in my mind for more than a few hours, and especially the songs written by talents such as Ann and Nancy Wilson. A little googling turned up the answer with a passage repeated by many sources.Read more »

I’ve always loved this scene introducing Peter O’Toole in David Lean’sLawrence of Arabia. In a film rife with extraordinary storytelling and wisdom, it remains my favourite. In hindsight perhaps it’s the spiritual undertone of Lawrence’s statement that’s always intrigued me most because, of course, Lawrence isn’t only talking about physical pain here. There’s plenty of that in store for him, and he endures it with savage grace and gritty dignity. But the pain he later suffers with some dismay is emotional, even spiritual. For example, after he is forced to execute a man Lawrence falls into a crisis of identity, and experiences devestating self-doubt, when he realises to his own horror that he enjoyed killing him.

Life hurts. Life is suffering, the Buddha told us. Lawrence of Arabia tells us the trick is … not minding that it hurts. Lawrence navigated through the variety of physical tortures and the sell-denial the desert and life sometimes require with remarkable grace. The wounds to his self-identification, however, almost undid him. Read more »

I haven’t been living the sacred enough lately. Sometimes I forget how sacred life is, become caught up in the mundane, the day-to-day of existing in a corporeal world, in the meanness that can be everyday life. I stop, for a while, living a life that is sacred.

I’m often aware that I’m doing it. Sometimes it takes a while to gather myself up again, find the energy to re-energise, re-discover the alignments in my daily practices that connect me with the beauties and perfections I can find even in the most mundane-seeming events of the day. Something as simple as a neat and tidy home, a smile on a friend’s face, the way the wind ruffles the leaves of the quaking aspen in the front yard and the soothing sound of that ruffling.Read more »

Peter is a pen name, as all the characters who post on this blog are. I am Patrick Jennings, and this is just one of several blogs I've created in the last couple decades. The most recent (and only active) one is Pix to Words, which features my own photographs as points of inspiration for writing, including short stories, travelogues, essays, poetry and other genres. Read more »

Movies

We are, each of us, a speck, living on a speck, rotating around a speck which is just one of billions of specks clustered in a speck. Here am I experiencing my own infinitesimal significance. I realize: I am a miracle, infinite in my miraculousness. In all the uncountable experiential […]

Music

The last time I really, really had a hard time letting go, I took a road trip through the American West. Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Arizona … Every time I’d see a white Toyota Highlander on the highway (you can’t imagine how many there are, especially in rural […]

Books

The Fever One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep — Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning […]